as sirguestalot mentioned , this type of captcha uses one word that it knows for sure what it is and one word which it wants you to translate for it.The most "everyday" word is normally the one you have to get correct and the wierd word you can pretty much type anything in there..

I'm not an internet security expert and I read Sophos articles to learn more. Thanks to those commenters who noted that only the first "word" is required to satisfy the captcha, I learned something new today.

For those of you criticising the author, keep it to yourself. Instead of denigrating someone who is passing along an ironic twist in facebook's pathetic security efforts, be happy that perhaps more average fb users are learning about internet security and reducing the chance of spreading viruses and malware.

I in no way what so ever thought Graham Cluley was uninformed about this particular CAPTCHA – I am quite sure he knows the details of how they work! He was just pointing out how very funny it was that Chinese characters would come up at all in an English speaking website. Lighten up people (SirGuestALot & Lol)!

I wasn’t insulting the author, but basic research on the recaptcha system would let him know just one of the two words must match what most other users have typed. On top of it, if this was a legitimate ‘fail’… The fail is on recaptcha’s/google’s end, not facebook.

Not really Facebook's fault but reCAPTCHA (so, Google). I get these often on other sites and it does raise a smirk.

Due to the algorithm it uses you can sometimes leave a word out (it is forgiving if the word has not been presented often) but most of the time you are required to enter both. (See paragraph 6 of http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore)

Speaking of funny CAPTCHAs, the most amusing one I encountered was the random letter CAPTCHA on MySpace.com. On one occasion, it spelled out a very bad four-letter word (I can't post it here or I would be censored but I can tell you that it began with a C and ended in T!)

I did wonder for a second if someone at MySpace was trying to tell me something!